I pretty much stopped using/updating the CHANGELOG.txt in all of my projects, after having learned some git fu.

Being able to cleanly cherry-pick + merge commits between branches (including topic/feature branches, so not only the primary major version branches) is way more important than the changelog's purpose.

Comments

I don't mind removing CHANGELOG.txt, I only look at git anyway.
How about doing this in a two-step approach? Step one adds a notice at the top of the file saying it will no longer be updated, along with a link to the commit log or release notes. Step two actually removes the file from the repo.

That should prevent users who do not remove the old Wysiwyg folder before extracting a new release from wondering why the changelog is the same.

The changelog does not reference #issue numbers or issue titles. All entries are written manually and independently and in a way that makes sense and makes them human-readable.

All issues that will need a changelog entry are tagged with "API change" and/or "API addition" and/or "API clean-up".

We'll have to go through the existing changelog once in order to rewrite it.

In order to make the maintenance of CHANGELOG.txt not the nightmare it was (requiring "Preparing new release" commits before doing a release), we do not add a version heading for the most recent entries, and only add one for the previous version when adding a new entry after the last release.

In other words, the CHANGELOG.txt contained in the upcoming 7.x-2.2 release will look like this:

The heading for "Wysiwyg 7.x-2.2" is only inserted when a new noteworthy change happens in 2.x-dev (for the future 2.3 release).

That said, maintaining a proper changelog is time-consuming and we're generally lacking time and developer resources in the Wysiwyg project. So while I think that this new proposal would make a lot of sense and provide users a very useful overview of actual changes, I also see and realize that less overhead has a good chance of leading to more progress. This needs to be balanced sensibly.